TACTIC ("Health impact toolkit for climate change attribution") is a 3-year research project that has been recently funded by Wellcome Trust (Call Attriverse - Developing Digital Solutions for Health Impact Attribution). The project will start in March 2025 and aims to develop a living digital toolkit to facilitate research illuminating attributable health impact of climate change. It is a consortium led by Ana M. Vicedo-Cabrera, with researchers from Spain (Prof. Rachel Lowe, Barcelona Supercomputing Center), UK (Dr Rupert Stuart- Smith, Oxford University), US (Dr Sadie Ryan, University of Florida), Peru (Gabriel Carrasco-Escobar, Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia), Colombia (Dr Mauricio Santos, University of Los Andes), Mozambique (Dr Tatiana Marrufo, National Health Institute), Malawi (Dr James Chirombo, Malawi Liverpool Wellcome Trust Center) and from World Meteorological Organization (Dr Joy Guillot Shumake).
The toolkit will be co-produced with key stakeholders and informed by communities facing climate-driven health impacts. Organized in hubs and deployed in a website platform, our toolkit will deliver up-to-date data, didactic methodological resources, and additional information to support researchers and other stakeholders in conducting health attribution studies. The team will furnish the toolkit with new evidence and methods refined by the project team on understudied policy-relevant research questions (i.e., contribution of individual emitters, impact of emission pathways and overshoot scenarios, comparison of attribution methods, development of policy-relevant health indicators) in climate change hotspots (i.e., Southern Africa, the Andes, and the Mediterranean). The team will conduct a series of case studies, of high priority to local decision-makers and communities, on neglected health outcomes and their unequal impact (e.g., climate-sensitive infectious diseases, kidney disease, mental health, maternal health). The team will develop communication guidelines and policy-relevant insights on the health burden of climate change to improve science-to policy translation and maximize the impact of the findings. The TACTIC toolkit will boost capacity building in low resource settings and advance knowledge and awareness on climate change impacts on health.
